What is Pound Plus?
The purpose of community learning is to develop the skills, confidence, motivation and resilience of adults of different ages and backgrounds in order to:
- progress towards formal learning or employment
- improve their health and well-being, including mental health
- develop stronger communities
Community learning courses fall under the following four strands:
- personal and community development learning - learning for personal and community development, cultural enrichment, intellectual or creative stimulation and for enjoyment (in most cases not leading to a formal qualification)
- family English, maths and language - learning to improve the English language and maths skills of parents, carers or guardians and their ability to help their children
- wider family learning - learning to help different generations of family members to learn together how to support their children’s learning
- neighbourhood learning in deprived communities - supports local Voluntary and other third sector organisations to develop their capacity to deliver learning opportunities for the residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods
Pound plus
Pound plus is a term used by the education and skills funding agency to describe and represent additional income generated by providers of adult education over and above the core funding. It is anything else we can do to generate additional income, such as fee income or funding in kind, for example free venues. In generating additional income it allows us to maximise the value of public investment and is used to increase the offer we can provide to our communities and residents in North Yorkshire. Any Pound plus fee income is used for the people who most at need, and can least afford, community learning provision.
What we do
In order to receive this money, we must ensure that public funding is focused on people who need it most, those least likely to participate in learning. We therefore collect fees from people who can afford to pay, unless otherwise prescribed by the education and skills funding agency, and use these to extend provision to those who cannot.
Our adult learning and skills service adds value to the adult education budget by working closely with partners. In doing so this reduces costs by sharing resources and attracting in kind funding to widen the offer available to disadvantaged learners who otherwise may not be able to afford course fees. We have a differentiated fees policy is in place, which includes a mix of fee-paying public courses and free targeted provision.
The main contributors of Pound plus in adult learning and skills service include:
- appropriate fee income (those who can afford to pay and reinvests this by providing access to courses free of charge to those who cannot)
- provide a fee structure which is competitively priced, ranging from workshops and other community learning courses with concessionary fees available
- to work collaboratively with other providers in the county
- curriculum efficiency – avoiding duplicate provision
- curriculum planning – to ensure the course offer meets both the government priorities and the needs of the local communities
- curriculum offer that is open to all adults in North Yorkshire
- the offer of progression opportunities leading to increased participation through to other funding streams including accredited courses
- access to venues at no or reduced costs
- the use of volunteers to support learning
- the use of shared resources
- partnership working and offering a bespoke curriculum to their client groups
- access to other funding sources or equipment
Partnerships
Our community learning outreach provision mainly developed with and delivered to community organisations consists of bespoke and specific programmes designed to meet the particular needs of targeted groups of learners, usually the clients of organisation. The programme of learning activities are proposed in partnership with local community and voluntary organisations and schools. There is an expectation that adult learning and skills service funding is a contribution to overall costs of delivery and that partners will add value by contributing in kind (such as offering free venue or expertise) or through cost savings (such as recruiting and supporting learners). There is an expectation that the provision will in turn reduce costs to other services for example, interventions to improve health and wellbeing to keep people mentally healthy and fit will reduce visits to GPs, through reducing rural and social isolation (which is a major cost to services). The ongoing partnerships with Department for Work and Pensions job centre plus aim to reduce costs to local government through a structure that helps unemployed people get back into work.
Monitoring
Adult learning and skills service undertake regular reviews of provision and take feedback from partners and communities to widen participation. We monitor through our quality processes and self-assessment process.